Google tweaks logos, embraces lowercase text

Google's new 'streamlined' logos will be arriving soon on just about all of its Web pages.

(Credit: Google)

Google is tweaking the logos of several popular products in a bid to "streamline the user experience."

How a move to a logo with lowercase text and a uniform blue font streamlines the user experience is a bit beyond my powers of analysis, but Google's Marissa Mayer and Jamie Devine said in a blog post that at the moment Google logos for certain products are different shapes and sizes, and so moving to a consistent size, font, and style "should make it easier for you to recognize which site you are on and navigate to wherever you want to go." However, it seems a bit of a stretch to believe people visiting Google Maps weren't sure whether they were on that site or Google News because Google used different font sizes and colors in the logos.

In any event, the new logo style can currently be found on the Google Code, Google Labs, and Google Moderator sites, and will be coming to the rest of the Googleverse in due course. The new logos couldn't help but remind me of former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's fondness for lowercase text in the many e-mails sent to Yahoo employees over the past year, although that was probably unintentional.

[jbirge]

What a classic example of designer hyperbole. In actually, if the sites previously did not have a standard logo layouts, wouldn't that have made them MORE easy to discern from each other before?

[svk1069]

The blog post mentions that Google product names "will appear in clean, simple blue lowercase type." The site Google Labs as a site already sporting the new look, but when I go to Google Labs, I see the "labs" text in gray, not blue.

[kenstech_com]

This is a bad sign. Google's logo has in the past been a measure of the fact that Google was a fun place to work, and that in turn was a measure of the fact that it has been such an innovative place.

It's a small thing, and I doubt very seriously that the people behind this can really justify their notion that it will "streamline the user experience." More likely, some bureaucratic hacks at Google are trying to justify their existence by proposing these changes, and that is what is bad. It means Google is turning into Microsoft.

Ken
www.Kenstech.com

[the_ricochet]

I don't get why people are complaining.

They mentioned a very subtle change in a simple blog post..it's not like they sent this out as a press release on how it's going to increase stock value.

Some people need to complain about the tiniest things it seems. Or the column writer was just out of ideas and needed to fill up CNET's weekly word count quota.

[calculatorwatch]

they have the new logo on the Google video search right now, it looks bad.

I don't blame them for trying to unify the logos but why cant they do the blue words underneath the Google logo like basically everything has already? it looks much better

of course, it don't see how this means Google is turning into Microsoft, and it's not a big deal anyways, it's just a bad design choice